OSGi on the Mediacenter?

Today I visited the Lonworks conference in Paris to discuss some OSGi related issues with Echelon, a company that makes powerline networks. While I was there, I followed a number of sessions and visited the exhibition booths.

It is impressive to see an industry that never stopped trying to create the home control market, despite all the setbacks. I worked in home automation in 1997 at Ericsson Research and fought with Echelon at that time to provide us with cheaper chips to enable a market. I remember their frustration that everybody was always promising them the multi-billion home market while in reality it never happened. Well, now 8 years later, it still has not happened. However it looks like a perfect storm is brewing. This company has solved many of the problems that made the adoption of home control in the past difficult. It is now reliable, but more important, it has become much easier to use. Today you can build home-sized control systems without any tools except for a screwdriver, using existing wires. They found a solution to the tricky problem when a switch has no continuous power (which is common), which now makes it possible to use existing wiring. And last, but definitely not least, they seem to have standardized on the CENELEC standard, which unifies the market and will make them more popular in Europe.

The only real problem left is price. One speaker talked about a price range of €100 per tablet; and you need two to control one light. At about 30 lights in my house that is a €6000 price; obviously too high for mass market deployment (clearly for me!). A Korean company mentioned a price of $2000 for a home system including water based floor-heating control, electronic door lock, presence sensor, and gas alarm. Much better, but still steep.

From an OSGi perspective I noticed two things. First that Macromedia Flash is fast becoming the GUI standard of choice. Forget widgets like Swing, SWT, or Thinlets; Flash is the way to go. You will have to hire a graphic designer but think of the number of hours you save by not having a technical programmer make futile attempts to interact were mere mortals. Let him focus on the middleware and let her handle the more communicative aspects. Maybe Flash should become the first OSGi specified GUI technology?

The second observation is that it looks like the Mediacenter of Microsoft is making some inroads. The Mediacenter is a high powered PC running a special version of Microsoft XP. It has a TV tuner and lots of disc storage to record footage. For ease of use, it can be controlled with a remote control. When you think about it, the Mediacenter is a dream environment for an OSGi Service Platform. Lots of resources! Installing an OSGi Service Platform on a Mediacenter should be no problem due to the open nature of XP. This could be a boon to OSGi developers, instead of having to choose between .NET and Java, they could choose Java and run on both large and small machines. Maybe it is time to do an experiment with this model?

   Peter Kriens

posted by Peter @ Friday, October 21, 2005